All events in the Festival are free to attend, but booking is required. E-tickets will be available to book after 10am on Tuesday 31 January via the LSE online store: http://eshop.lse.ac.uk/. For any queries see LSE Events at events@lse.ac.uk 0207 955 6043

The lineup:

MISS ME: THE ARTFUL VANDAL
Director: Mohammed Pullinger
2015 / 4 min / United States

From subliminal to subversive: At the height of a successful career at one of the world’s top advertising agencies, renowned Montreal-based “Miss Me” quit her job and took to the streets to become an underground street artist. Her goal? Self-liberation, authenticity, and to be a loud, counter-voice to the objectification of women in mainstream advertising.

WE ALL WE GOT
Director: Carlos Javier Ortiz
2015 / 4 min / United States

Carlos Javier Ortiz has been documenting the consequences of gun violence in Chicago and Philadelphia for over 8 years. His work is especially focused on the impact such violence has on shaping the lives of youth in these communities. We All We Got captures the poetic language of the streets: the ghetto birds flying over the city; music popping out of cars; people talking on the street corners as preachers holler for the violence to stop after another young person was senselessly gunned down on the streets of Chicago.

LA LAGUNA
Director: Aaron Schock
2016 / 40 min / Mexico

Set within the rainforests of southern Mexico, La Laguna tells the story of a Mayan boy’s remarkable journey from childhood to adolescence. While Yu’uk and his younger brother José enjoy a childhood of uncommon freedom in the jungle, Yu’uk’s family’s problems begin to mount and leaving his village – and his beloved little brother – may be his family’s only hope.

EPICLY PALESTINE’D
Director: Theo Krish and Philip Joa
2016 / 26 min / United Kingdom

A small group of Palestinian teenagers gain the attention of the sporting world when they create a skateboarding scene in the heart of the West Bank – a place where you can’t even buy a skateboard – whilst facing the challenges of living under military occupation.

POSHIDA: HIDDEN LGBT PAKISTAN
Director: Faizan Fiaz
2016 / 28 min / Pakistan, United Kingdom

Poshida takes the queer love story at the heart of Sufi Islam as its pivot, telling the hidden story of a range of queer people living in Pakistan, with particular insight into the political realities of transgender men and women. It is beautifully shot, poetic and sympathetic to the lives and struggles of the people it portrays.

This is an external screening taking place at the Sheikh Zayed Theatre (New Academic Building, 54 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3LJ). The event is free and open to all.

E-tickets will be available to book online after 10am on Tuesday 2 February via LSE online store. For any queries see LSE Events FAQ or contact events@lse.ac.uk.

A map of the LSE campus is available here

Full programme:

HOTEL 22
Director: Elizabeth Lo
2014 / 8 min / Germany

Each night in Silicon Valley, the Line 22 transforms from a public bus into an unofficial shelter for the homeless. This film captures one dramatic night on the Hotel 22 bus.

ENTREMUNDO (WORLDS ON EDGE)
Director: Thiago B. Mendonça
2014 / 25 min / Brazil

One day in the most unequal neighbourhood of Sao Paolo.

IF I DIE ON MARS
Director: Ed Perkins
2015 / 10 min / UK

Meet the three aspiring astronauts willing to leave behind everything—and everyone—to travel to Mars…and never return. Over 200,0000 people from around the globe are competing for four seats on a MarsOne spaceship and the chance to be the first humans to colonise Mars. In If I Die on Mars, director Ed Perkins asks three finalists about their ambitions, their fears, and their reasons for leaving earth forever.

PERFECTION IS FOREVER
Director: Mara Trifu
2015 / 18 mins / UK

Human beings always aspire to become something more, doing their best to hold back time in pursuit of eternal love, youth and beauty. In Hollywood, two lost souls seek to become heroes under the shade of a lonely palm tree.

LUCHADORA
Director: River Finlay
2015/ 12 mins/ United States

‘Luna Mágica’ is a professional Lucha Libre Wrestling star who dreams of becoming World Wrestling Champion while struggling to make ends meet as a single mom in Mexico City and regain custody of her son, who was taken by her estranged husband who claims she is unfit to be a mother because of her profession as a luchadora.

On Friday 5 June 2015, the News Impact Summit, a free of charge digital journalism conference will take place in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre on the LSE campus in London. This summit will centre on the theme – The Social Impact of Digital Storytelling – and shed a light on how digital age journalism plays a role in resulting the social impact, whether it is during the general election, natural disasters or humanitarian conflicts.

The Frontline Club has joined the international consortium of the organisers led by the European Journalism Centre, the News Lab at Google, LSE’s Polis think-tank. Participants will be offered free lunch and drinks during this event as well as a networking opportunity with the guests from the leading international and UK media outlets.

Speakers:
– George Arnett, data journalist, The Guardian
– Charlie Beckett, director, Polis at LSE
– Fergus Bell, head of newsroom partnerships and innovation, SAM
– Wendy Betts, director of eyeWitness, The International Bar Association
– John Burn-Murdoch, data journalist, The Financial Times
– Matt Cooke, European lead, News Lab at Google
– Evangeline de Bourgoing, programme manager, Global Editors Network
– Matthew Eltringham, editor, Journalism BBC Academy
– Miranda Green, freelance journalist
– Steve Herrmann, editor, BBC News Online
– Rohan Jayasekara, technology hub adviser, Internews
– Christoph Koettl, adviser on technology and human Rights, Amnesty International
– Megan Lucero, data journalism editor, The Times and Sunday Times
– Jason Mills, head of digital, ITV News
– Paul Myers, researcher, BBC
– Gavin Rees, director, Dart Centre Europe
– Allison Rockey, engagement editor, Vox.com
– Wilfried Ruetten, director, European Journalism Centre
– Frédérik Ruys, data journalist for ‘Netherlands from Above’, VPRO
– George Sargent, producer, Thomson Reuters
– Rina Tsubaki, European Journalism Centre
– Julia Ziemer, Polis at LSE

Partners:
Frontline Club
GEN
Amnesty International
Dart Centre Europe
eyeWitness
Internews
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
SAM
Foreign Press Association

For further details see here or contact the organisers via info@newsimpact.io

Hashtag: #nisldn
Website: http://newsimpact.io

On Friday 27 March, the Frontline Club partnered with the London School of Economics to host a series of films for the 7th annual LSE Literary Festival. The external screening, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was packed out with members of the public for a night of short films exploring the foundations of identity and place. The five films took the audience on a journey to far flung corners of the earth, from rural Turkey to the Arctic Circle. While striking in their different visual styles, each shared a common thread by providing intimate snapshots of the lives of displaced individuals, traumatised and trapped in alien landscapes.

“You have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go,” whispers Habib Aydin as he captures a wild bird in a crude wooden cage on the outskirts of his village in south-east Turkey. This is one of the most symbolic scenes in Reber Dosky’s The Call, which follows the story of Habib and his determination to call his only son Ramazan back to settle in the village they fled in 1989. While Habib returned 7 years ago to remarry, his first family remained in Istanbul. “What does this village have to offer?” Ramazan asks during a short visit to see his father. Habib replies: “animals, rocks… what does it not have?” Touched with humour and a soundtrack of birdsong and bleating goats, Dosky presents a story about loss of tradition across a generational divide, where the disconnect between love of family and land is felt keenly.

Xenos, a short by Mahdi Fleifel, follows a group of impoverished Lebanese youths trapped in Greece which is in the grip of economic disaster. Their hopeless existence unfolds in a telephone conversation, played over shots of streets lined with drug addicts cowering in shuttered shop porches. The camera is grainy and uncomfortably intrusive, reflecting the desperate measures they take for money to buy hard drugs. “I’ve tried to mingle with the Greeks,” one youth says, “but when you do, they assume you are gay. They say ‘you want sex?’” Speaking of how they sell their bodies to strangers in a nearby park, another reflects. “This country ruins your soul.”

Tuna Kaptan and Felicitas Sonvilla offers a different perspective of the conventional refugee narrative in Two at the Border, by focusing on the plight of two smugglers stationed at the Turkish city of Edirne near Greece. Ali, from Syria, and Naser, from Palestine, form a strong bond through their shared financial hardship and longing for home. “I thought about returning to Palestine,” Naser admits in the confines of his apartment. “My parents are seriously ill. They cry on the phone for me to come home. I haven’t been able to send a single lira back.” Stuck in their own limbo, their lives consist of traversing the distance between their apartment and the heavily patrolled borders.

In October 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Morgan Knibbe’s Shipwreck is a testament to the horrors faced by those who resort to crossing into Europe by sea. The camera sways and lurches as hundreds of coffins are loaded onto a military ship at the harbour. Between the hysteria and silence of loss, one survivor, Abraham, whispers his story as he walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks.

In the last film of the evening, Adrift, Frederik Jan Depickere follows the story of Simu, a Ugandan who fled political persecution. He now works as a construction site cleaner 150km above the Arctic Circle. With all his family dead or missing, Simu stares out over the ghostly tundra landscape. “I used to dream of being a pop singer,” he says. “But according to my situation now, I think that dream is dead.” The camera pans over a field of snow peppered with bare black trees. “I don’t belong here. But at home they would just make me disappear.”

For more information on the LSE Literary Festival 2015, click here.

Strictly by invitation only. Please contact the organisers for inquiries or view the website here.

On Wednesday 17 April, the editorial teams of the top 40 student publications in the country are coming together for an evening at the Frontline Club.

The evening will begin with a reception before moving to panel debates and talks with speakers, including: John Witherow, editor of The Times; Sarah Baxter, editor of The Sunday Times Magazine; Ian Katz, deputy editor at The Guardian and Steve Richards at The Independent.

The event will be an opportunity to meet the other students running the best campus papers, with publications from the LSE, Imperial, UCL, Birmingham, Oxford, Durham, York, Cambridge, Warwick and Bristol among those attending.

A short film made for the Media workers against the war conference at the London School of Economics last weekend,

Amid all the current agonising about media integrity – and at a time when BBC management is preparing to cut news resources even further – can there be any area more worthy of scrutiny than reporting the war? link